


heart heart head.

by heartshapedcookie



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: The whole gang is here, and since im not cross posting it anywhere here it will stay, haha what if we were all trying to recover...and we were both kids??, literally just a slice of life fic like one week post Play, no shipping they're just like. Teenagers Trying to Maybe Be Friends Maybe, this is a zine fic i just never posted on here Whoops, very quiet angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22340854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartshapedcookie/pseuds/heartshapedcookie
Summary: A cafeteria conversation in the wake of accidentally forming a hive mind, causing mild pandemonium, and maybe creating an opportunity for friendships to flourish.//Or: the happy ending is coming, slowly, carefully.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	heart heart head.

**Author's Note:**

> haha what if we posted our fic from a zine from like 2018 after we stopped having anything to do with this fandom......and we were both girls??
> 
> this was a fic for the bmc aftermath zine and now its yours to "enjoy"

_ “And that’s the other deeply strange thing about this algorithmically-driven culture. Even if you’re a human, you end up having to behave like a machine just to survive.”— James Bridle _

_. _

_. _

“Do you know Aiden Forrester?”

He had stopped at his locker only out of slavish devotion to his routine. Being at school in the wake of what he had been emphatically referring to as The Whole Thing was its own kind of hell: he had managed to survive by adhering to his schedule, checking off every box and sealing himself inside the monotonous safety of his school day. It was difficult to think too critically about the voltaic twinges in his head or the the hot crawl of curious eyes on the back of his head when he was performing the role of clammy, quiet, and numbingly average High School Student with silent aplomb. 

The day’s proceedings did not include Jenna Rolan standing expectantly at his locker; Jeremy reacted accordingly to the sudden script revision. “I… Do you mean—I, uh, I mean, no. No.”

“Damn.” Jenna tapped at her phone. He belatedly realized that she had gotten a new phone case—rose-gold with a white pop socket. Thinking about what had likely happened to her old case made his tongue feel like it was two sizes too big for his mouth. “How about Morgan Foster?”

The name actually did ring a bell, but Jeremy was well beyond anything approximating coherency. He opened his mouth to stammer a response, then weakly shook his head. 

“This is a bad process,” Jenna said firmly, but not unkindly. She pocketed her phone and glanced pointedly at him. It occurred to him then that Jenna was waiting for him to follow her to the cafeteria, where the rest of the group was likely cloistered away at one of the circular lunch tables (always the circular ones, never the benches). His tongue was most definitely swelling. Maybe he’d spontaneously developed some allergy at the hospital and was about to die of anaphylactic shock for all of Middleborough to witness. It would be an embarrassingly fitting demise, but it was better than braving a curtain call. “Are you coming?”

Jeremy closed his locker without taking anything from it and dutifully followed Jenna towards the commons. He hadn’t planned on having lunch today: the cafeteria was too contentious an environment to navigate right now with his faculties still offline. There was the group— _ this is the group you need to assimilate into _ —and there was Michael and there was all the negative space in between where there had once been cold, cobalt certainty. 

“This is totally fucked, by the way,” Jenna said to him as they maneuvered through the crush of bodies. “Most of these videos were uploaded on school wifi, we should be able to report them to admin. They won’t even let us use Snapchat on the wifi.”

Jeremy hadn’t been actively processing any sensory input for the last few days, so it was several moments of mental rebooting and cognitive buffering before he was able to execute any function. When a quick search for “video” returned nothing relevant, he braved an external query. “What videos?”

Jenna shot him an incredulous look. “Seriously?”

A helpless grimace. 

“Oh, God. You’re serious. Come on.” 

The rest of the girls were already at the table. Typically, Brooke and Chloe would be piled together, experimenting with Snapchat filters and splitting a container of baby carrots, but today the birth of space between them couldn’t be wider. Christine was placed equidistant between them, a notebook and a clutch of highlighters on the table before her. They were each examining their phones grimly. 

Jenna hesitantly hovered by the table a moment before taking a seat between Brooke and Christine. Clutching his backpack straps securely, Jeremy weighed the outcomes of proximity with each of the girls at the table and wondered if it was considered an abuse of resources to collapse and have an ambulance called for him. He was seriously regretting returning to school.

“Hi, Jeremy.” This was Christine, smiling kindly. “It’s good to see you back.”

“Uh, thanks. You too. I mean—It’s good to see you here. At school.” Without someone feeding him the dialogue, he was having to improvise. Every word felt wrong and awkward as it tumbled out of his mouth, like painfully spitting out answers for oral exams in French. 

Her smile didn’t falter as she scooted her notebook aside. “Do you wanna sit down?”

Jeremy dropped his backpack next to hers and sat. His knee shivered past Christine’s own as he folded himself into the seat, blasting his senses with a cool, minty aftershock like aloe and Lifesavers. He blinked, rattled.

“Has anyone made any progress yet?” Chloe, pleat-crisp. 

“I got two reported last period,” Jenna said. “And I can probably get Madison to take hers down if I ask.” She then slid her eyes to Jeremy. “We’re talking about videos people took of the play.”

Chloe glanced up from her phone, momentarily meeting Jeremy’s gaze before a hot swell of embarrassment surged over them both like a tidal wave and pried their eyes apart; she looked instead to Jenna. “He doesn’t know?”

“I was in a mild coma,” Jeremy said, mostly to himself. Stone-grey remorse bubbled up briefly within Chloe before abruptly fizzling out, but he still felt it and judging by the quiet shifts and head turns that followed, so had the others. 

“People took videos of us at the play and they’re not super flattering,” Christine elaborated, glad to break the tension. “We’re trying to get them taken down.”

“Oh.” His episodic memories of the play were fuzzy at best, but the semantics had crystallized painfully—bruises and screaming and a dull ruby cadence that might have been Mountain Dew Red. There were other angles to it, filmed by the very brains that had clicked into a neural network with his own, but he felt uncomfortable exploring them. It was like browsing someone else’s Internet history.

“Yo.” Jeremy looked over his shoulder and found Jake at eye-level; he opened his mouth to say something—some awful half-sound that could barely be classified as a greeting, most likely—then realized Jake was at eye-level because he was seated in a wheelchair. His Pavlovian fear response to the sight of Jake Dillinger was still in the early stages of conditioning, but that didn’t stop him from violently breaking out into an ice-cold sweat. Christine jumped slightly, almost imperceptibly, to his left. “Uh, mind if I slide in, Heere?”

“Uh. No. No—uh, yeah.” Jeremy grabbed his backpack, swinging it out of the way so Jake could maneuver his chair into the gap separating the table’s two half-circle benches. The wheel nipped his heel as Jake rolled in.

“Oh, sorry, man.”

“No. It’s my fault.” He meant it sincerely and completely.

Jake’s glacier-bright gaze flared with something foreign, something unsettlingly brittle, before melting into a weary grin. “It’s cool, dude.”

“Hey. You dropped this.” A pair of white earbuds landed on the table. Jeremy instantly recognized the clutter of frayed bracelets on the hand’s wrist; his heart lurched.  _ Michael.  _

The idea of Michael overlapping with this province, the domain of embarrassing Twitter videos and cheating and nanotechnology shrapnel, made him physically recoil. He had done enough to Michael: allowing him to get braided into this nightmarish macrame of regret and resentment would only destroy what little collapsed architecture of their friendship they’d managed to restore at the hospital.

“Oh, thanks!” Jake said, flashing Michael an appreciative smile. “Shit’s been falling out of my bag all day.”

“No problem.” Michael tucked his hands into his pockets, then lifted his chin in acknowledgement of Jeremy. He weakly returned the gesture.

“Hi, Michael,” Christine greeted. Jeremy at once remembered that she and Michael were partners in Chemistry, and had a loose, casual friendship based on forgettable, lab report-sourced inside jokes. He’d been apocalyptically jealous when Michael had broken the news to him that he had been at a library table alone with Christine Cannigula. 

“Hey, Christine.”

“You wanna sit with us? We’ve got room,” she offered gamely. There was a minor flurry of mental activity—primarily incredulity—from the opposite side of the table, but nobody voiced an objection and Jeremy certainly wasn’t going to be the one to turn him away. 

“Sure. This table’s a pretty hot ticket from what I’ve heard,” he replied with a well-intentioned smirk. He slid into the spot between Christine and Jenna, but made no move to take down the hood keeping his face drizzled in shadowy obscurity.

They sat together at the table for a long, awkward moment. Jeremy hadn’t given much thought to the long-term consequences of a nonconsensual neural orgy on himself and the other brains involved—mostly because it had been profoundly easier not to think at all—but as he scanned the faces around him, he started to wonder if there hadn’t been side-effects to putting untested frontal lobe technology in his and seven other bodies. When he looked across the table at Brooke, he certainly  _ saw  _ a pretty blonde girl who was frowning at her phone and chewing on her lower lip. But now there was something just beneath her skin—or maybe above it? An aura that wasn’t quite visible, a whisper that wasn’t quite audible. He saw Brooke Lohst, but he also saw mascara streaks on her pillow and camp-braid bracelets being cut off wrists.

He saw the hurt he had given to her. 

And she wasn’t the only one. As green and crisp as Christine felt next to him, there was a silent desperation to it; she settled in his mind like a flower in desperate need of sunlight. Jenna was lipgloss-sticky and lost, a trinket at the bottom of a handbag. Chloe seethed with every bad test score and spilt drink in the world, every slight and injustice and stumble. Jake felt distantly cold, an imitation of something grander—like the Antarctica exhibit at the local zoo. And then there was Michael, still just out of his reach. He wasn’t being scrubbed from his sensory memory anymore, but he wasn’t quite tangible yet. There were too many firewalls separating them for Jeremy to read him—all he got was the baseline html code. 

“So,” Michael began in the total absence of conversation. “The hottest table in town doesn’t actually eat lunch during lunch. I’ll put that in my field notes.”

“We’re crowdsourcing a campaign to delete everything from the play off social media,” Christine explained.

Michael sucked in a sympathetic breath, striving for casualness but unconsciously retreating even deeper into the sanctuary of his hoodie. “Yikes. My condolences.”

“Your ass is famous because of it, Mell,” Jake remarked. There was nothing hostile in his plastic voice, but that didn’t stop Jeremy from flinching slightly on Michael’s behalf.

“Oh, yeah, my claim to fame. Throwing soda at my classmates. The line to shake my hand was down the block this morning.”

Brooke, Jenna, and Christine all giggled; Chloe’s glossy lips twitched into an amused grin. Jake blinked, visibly stunned, then elicited a laugh that could only be described as eardrum-lancing. That arctic crust of terror, at once terribly cold and flashbulb-bright, sloughed off of Jake in a single freeing release. Jeremy felt the boy thaw.

“Does that mean you have more than thirteen Twitter followers now?” Chloe asked, matching Michael’s sarcastic tone impeccably.

“Excuse me,” he shot back. “I had  _ fifteen  _ Twitter followers before this.”

“And two of them were me,” Jeremy said before he’d even realized his mouth was open. As the others began to laugh more openly, he felt guilt squeeze its way up his throat. However, when Jeremy found the nerve to meet Michael’s eyes, the boy was smiling. He still didn’t seem quite comfortable enough to emerge from his fortress of slightly odorous solitude, but there was a new coherency to him that bundled the stray bits of code into a functioning program. Jeremy cautiously smiled back.

“Oh, shit, Rich’s FaceTiming me.” Jake thumbed his FaceTime app open and instantly flipped the camera, allowing Rich to see the rest of the table as everyone waved at Jake’s phone. 

“You guys look like a college pamphlet,” Rich announced, fumbling with his phone until he was able to prop it up on a pillow. He flashed the camera an awkward peace sign. “Also, guess who has two thumbs and is getting out of here on Friday? This—FUCK, MY PHONE.” The screen abruptly went white.

“Wow, it’s like you’re here with us already,” Brooke called out. 

“I know, I know, you guys all miss me so much you can barely function, I get it,” Rich said as he picked his phone back up, this time angling it so that his face was visible. Florid patches of second-degree burns branded either freckled cheek like rouge and the red streak in his hair had faded to a rusty orange, but his gap-toothed smile was intact. “I’m so glad I called in the middle of the ‘We Miss Richard Goranski’ support group meeting.”

“Oh, is that why we’re here?” Jake asked, feigning surprise. 

“Well, it’s either that or the ‘My Brain Got Hacked’ support group meeting. Which you definitely shouldn’t be having without me because I’m, like, the fucking president of getting your brain hacked.” Rich paused pensively. His visage sparked with something familiar, gilded flashes of uncertainty flitting across his face like koi through water. “Sorry to exclude you, Mell.”

“That’s one group I’m okay being excluded from,” Michael replied with a stiff and seemingly involuntary finger-gun.

Rich chuckled. “Nah, you’re an honorary member. You’re pretty much stuck with us.”

“I guess I am.”

Jeremy inexorably glanced back at Michael, a rill of hope trailing dimly through him like the string of light left behind by a sparkler. He was leaning in a little closer, arms finally uncrossed, head raised and eyes alert. Some of the blocking extensions surrounding him had been deactivated and now he was running smoothly without the fear of being overlooked or ignored.

“So.” The koi darted away. “What’s on the meeting agenda today?”

Jake gave a practiced shrug. “Taking down videos from the play. You know.”

“Oh, shit. Good luck with that,” Rich snorted. “I already went down that road. Doesn’t matter if the video stays, people remember you having a massive freak-out.”

A thick smog of guilt rose from the table; Jenna deliberately set her phone down and began to dandle with the peeling acrylic on her thumbnails. Rich seemed to detect the atmospheric shift even through the phone, prompting him to offer a half-full glass to them.

“But hey! Only fucking losers remember what happened in high school. By next week there’ll probably be some parking lot fight or something and no one will remember this,” Rich pointed out. It was obvious that he’d given the concept a great deal of thought during his hospital stay.

“We’ll remember,” Chloe said, her voice unusually soft. She wasn’t steel, but glass.

“Hey.” This was Michael, turning slightly to address Chloe directly instead of the table as a single faceless entity. “I read this thing last week about how the human body literally regenerates itself every ten years. New cells and everything. By the time we all get out of here, we’ll be totally different. Most of your cells in that video won’t even exist anymore.”

Chloe stared at him for a long moment, not appearing to have expected any sort of meaningful response. She ached pinkly for a second with all the emotional release of a diary being opened, then allowed her anger to sublimate into talc instead of harden into diamond. “Wow. So you’re pretentious  _ and  _ a nerd.”

“What can I say? I’m a double-threat with a New York Times subscription.”

Jeremy watched, quietly amazed, as Chloe Valentine struck up a conversation with Michael about opinion pieces. Without a single initiative uniting them, the group splintered into separate discussions: Brooke and Jenna started lamenting to one another about how difficult their upcoming Spanish midterm was going to be while Jake caught Rich up on what he’d missed since they’d spoken last. At Jeremy’s left, Christine closed out of Safari and tapped him lightly on the arm. She reached out to him like a sprout towards sunlight. “Can I please show you this backstage video from Atlantic Theater? It’s been haunting me all week.”

He couldn’t help the smile that crossed his face as she hopefully offered him an earbud. “Of course.”

The lunch bell eventually rang, at which point everyone at the table bid Rich farewell and started collecting their bags. Brooke purposefully swung her patterned lunchbox in a demonstrative arc. The windows inside of her that had been tightly shuttered drifted cautiously open. “Tomorrow I’m bringing Goldfish. Anyone who wants any better get here fast and get their share.”

_ We’re doing this again tomorrow,  _ Jeremy thought. He couldn’t bring himself to be anxious or even astonished: he was only glad to know that he’d have another opportunity to see these people as they truly were—as more than lines of code or contact names in a group chat. There would be time to fix things. 

He packed up his bag slowly as the group went their separate ways. When he finally slung his backpack over his shoulder and stood, Michael was waiting for him, hood still firmly in place but his hand outstretched expectantly. “C’mon, dude. Lay it on me.”

Moving cautiously, Jeremy lifted his own hand and allowed it to collide with Michael’s in a shaky high-five. Along the way, he rediscovered his rhythm, which better prepared him for the second high-five and ankle tap that followed. He didn’t realize just how elated he was to perform this trivial ritual until he looked up at Michael and recognized the sunset-light in his eyes as affection. “I never thought I’d miss that stupid handshake.”

“That’s real bold coming from the person who invented it,” Michael retorted, hitching his bag higher onto his shoulder. “See you in History?”

“Yeah.” Jeremy smiled and let go of a breath he’d been holding for months. “I’ll see you then.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> the fact that i still love jeremy heere in the year 2020 says so much about everyone involved tbh


End file.
